Open Educational Resources (OER): Resource Roundup

Resources by Topic: OER, a part of the global open content movement, are shared teaching, learning, and research resources available under legally recognized open licenses -- free for people to reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute. Why are OER important? High-quality OER can save teachers significant time and effort on resource development and advance student learning inside and outside the classroom. Further, open sharing of resources has the potential to fuel collaboration, encourage the improvement of available materials, and aid in the dissemination of best practices. For more about the potential of OER, check out "5-Minute Film Festival: Why Open Education Matters," by Edutopia's VideoAmy. Getting Started Sharing Resources The nonprofit Creative Commons offers free, easy-to-use copyright licenses that allow you to specify which rights to your works you want to reserve and which rights you'd like to waive. Quality Considerations With all the promise of OER, some challenges remain.

Strategies and Resources for Supporting English-Language Learners"The hardest part of living in a different country is the language barrier. Because you know you have to learn the language in order to survive." – Betina Johnson Being an English-language learner in the United States is no honeymoon. Efforts to support ELLs have often been well meaning but misinformed. Indeed, a lot of assumptions about how to serve ELLs need to be checked. UC Berkeley experts Margaret Bridge and Bruce Fuller offer three examples of these faulty assumptions:

A guide to open educational resourcesThis guide explains open educational resources (OER) and the benefits that creating, sharing and using OER can provide. Open educational resources (OER) are learning and teaching materials, freely available online for anyone to use. Examples include full courses, course modules, lectures, games, teaching materials and assignments. They can take the form of text, images, audio, video and may even be interactive. Teachers, learners and the general public can access and make use of open educational resources, irrespective of their location or affiliation with any particular institution. Open educational resources are shared via the websites of education providers and through public services like i-Tunes U (link is external), SlideShare (link is external), YouTube (link is external) and Jorum (link is external).

Download & Streaming : Open Educational Resourcescollection eye MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW), available at makes the course materials used in the teaching of all MIT undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user in the world. Educators utilize the materials for curriculum development, while students and self-learners around the globe use them for self-study or supplementary use. With more than 2,000 courses now available, OCW is delivering on the promise of open sharing of knowledge.8 High-Quality OER CollectionsResource Spotlight 8 High-Quality OER Collections Finding high-quality open educational resources used to be a challenge, but a number of curated OER collections have made the task much easier for educators. Here are eight sources that can help. 1.

3 Classroom Tools to Measure Student LearningFormative assessment is vital to teachers in any classroom environment. Teachers have been formatively assessing students for years, because we must know what our students know in order to help them understand what they do not know. Do you know what I mean?! Fortunately, many classrooms are charging into the 21st century with technology initiatives. Whether your technology program has created a 1:1 environment, a BYOD system, or you have access to only a few devices in your classroom, these three tech tools will help you engage your students while simultaneously gauging their understanding of concepts.

Open educational resourcesUNESCO believes that universal access to high quality education is key to the building of peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open Educational Resources (OER) provide a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of education as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building. Open Educational Resources are teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution. In 2001, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in an unprecedented move, announced the release of nearly all its courses on the internet for free access. As the number of institutions offering free or open courseware increased, UNESCO organized the 1st Global OER Forum in 2002 where the term Open Educational Resources (OER) was adopted.

What is OER? - Creative CommonsWhat are Open Educational Resources (OER)? Open educational resources (OER) are free and openly licensed educational materials that can be used for teaching, learning, research, and other purposes. Open Education "...is the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge." —The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation OER DefinitionsExploring Essential Questions with a Group of ObjectsBy: Tess Porter, Educational Technician, Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access Trying to brainstorm your next Learning Lab collection, but not sure where to start? With a particular topic in mind, creating a large collection of objects and grounding them in a few guiding questions can be a great way to create a simple, investigative, multi-disciplinary, evidence-based, discussion-sparking collection for your students. This method is flexible, can be used with a wide variety of topics, and works best in a collection containing 20–50 objects.

‘Get to know you’ questionsI use this activity as a ‘get to know you’ with new classes and it can be adapted for any level. It can also serve as revision for question forms which I’ll come back to at the end. This idea originated from a development session I attended at IH ILC Brno and it has altered over time to become the activity below. ‘Get to know you’ I write the following on the right side of the board:Open Education ResourcesIntroduction to Open Education Resources The Term Open Educational Resources (OER) was coined at UNESCO’s 2002 Forum on Open Courseware and designates “teaching, learning and research materials in any medium, digital or otherwise, that reside in the public domain or have been released under an open license that permits no-cost access, use, adaptation and redistribution by others with no or limited restrictions. Why Open Education Resources are good for Australian schools, teachers and students

Open Educational Resources (OERs)What are OERs? Open Educational Resources are freely available teaching and learning materials which the author has licensed in an open format to allow others to re-use and adapt. They can include lecture notes and slides, handouts given to students, online tutorials, diagrams or even an entire Moodle course. In many cases the author has assigned a Creative Commons licence to the resource indicating that it can be used freely.Generation Global: How Cross-Cultural Dialogue Builds Critical Thinking and EmpathyThe world and the people who work and live in it have become ever more connected as the internet becomes more accessible. Yet despite the ability to connect and learn about happenings on the other side of the globe, many communities have become more polarized and entrenched in a particular worldview. As these trends emerge, teachers are looking for ways to foster productive dialogue skills in today’s students — the generation that will have to deal with complex, increasingly global problems. Activities that connect students to peers in other countries have become more common in classrooms because it’s now possible.

Paul Ford: What is Code?A computer is a clock with benefits. They all work the same, doing second-grade math, one step at a time: Tick, take a number and put it in box one. Tick, take another number, put it in box two. Tick, operate (an operation might be addition or subtraction) on those two numbers and put the resulting number in box one.